What was the best FPS game/series from the 90s?
Well, the Featured Poll absolutely screws up the front page layout just as badly as I expected it would, and isn't even set in a properly labeled div class for adblocking convenience.
Additionally, the poll msses some of the major series (eg, Hexen/Heretic, Turok, System Shock, Descent, Star Wars: Dark Forces and Jedi Knight, etc; And since GoldenEye is mentioned, other 3PS games like Tomb Raider; Since PC isn't specified, that'd include console 3PS games like Syphon Filter or Resident Evil), as well as an "Other" option. The omissions are made even odder by the fact that Heretic is mentioned by name.
Not really working out to be a good sell of the Featured Poll concept.
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as well as a "Potato" option
There. Fixed it for ya. :3
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Hi Sooth. I did omit a number of games and series to keep the poll from growing too large, and I instead tried to focus on those that are most iconic. I'm not too concerned about the homepage layout since I can easily adjust the design and add an option for users to hide the poll. Before taking time to set that up, I wanted to see if users would actually use the poll and discussion.
In 16 hours we have 4,219 votes and almost 25% of today's comments in the discussion section are in this post. I would argue that's a good proof of concept and worth exploring.
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I was wondering how this would work with people that use add-ons for infinite scrolling, would it work better if it was fixed at either top side instead?
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My point was only that there was a lack of an "Other" option (as others have noted, in this case there should also have been a N/A option, as well), even though many significant games that remain notable to this day had been overlooked. It just felt weirdly missing, given it being a standard, especially since you covered an "Other" option in your description, through referencing Heretic(/Hexen) (great game series that that was).
Good to hear that you'll be adding a hide function. In fact, you could perhaps do a {"Full View", "Minimalist/Collapsed View", "Hidden"} toggle, with Minimalist View (maybe just title and current top vote only, until you open un-collapse it) set as the default. That way all major preferences could be covered.
To work with Ashtart's comment, you could perhaps further also have another toggle as to where it's positioned (eg, Top of Page, Middle of Page, Bottom of Page, and possibly also Sidebar). In theory, "Top of Page" or "Sidebar" (if there's no UI issues with that implementation) would presumably work well enough to avoid infinite scrolling issues, with scripts themselves being able to address any additional concerns.
And, well, the vote count makes for an interesting point of reference- generally, from what I've seen in the past, anything up to 600 votes is fairly normal for an immediate response to a thread poll, so by comparison to that you can definitely determine that this is a good method of attracting interest into discussions. Conversely, I'd argue that the comment count isn't clearly indicative of any specific interest, since official threads and new things on SG always attract massive attention at first (and at the moment there's also the impact of technically motivated posts, such as mine and Ashtart's, which don't reflect thread interest).
Overall, I'd definitely have to agree with your conclusion that it's a potential benefit to the site (indeed, my only concern with the idea has ever been in its presentation, both as far as there being a need to avoid inflammatory or overly inclusive polls, and in regards to it cluttering up the homepage, the latter of which it's currently doing to a degree I personally find to be rather frustrating).
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Initially I did feel a bit bad for not being able to give a vote to Half-Life myself, but I feel better seeing it leads the poll anyway. To me personally this is one of those cases where the answer is "set in stone" from the get-go and I can't even consider another one.
There's no denying that several of those wouldn't have been (and still are) great games, but DOOM is revolutionary so it just has to be the answer for me. It's not the oldest from the list, but it's the pioneering game in the genre, a true example of the "[x] walked so [y] could run" expression.
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Does anyone remember Turok here?
Damn I had heck of a fun with that game.
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I love all these games, but I'm gonna add System Shock 1&2 into the mix. Those are some favorites. And that's just the tip of the iceberg!
God, it's amazing how spoiled I was in the '90s. There was so much goodness for FPS fans.
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Great games, but the most important one in my childhood was goldeneye 100%
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I loved playing that with my bro. We'd take turns with the single player, then switch off to multiplayer. I have such fond memories of it!
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Why Blood isn't an option, but GoldenEye 007 is? Especially when Bond game isn't real series thing, since it's just one game.
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Not that I mind seeing half life at the top of the list, but to me it depends on what type of fps we're talking about. For a game with levels half life and doom are the perfect choices. For a multiplayer/deathmatch game the win easily goes to quake iii(1999) tied with unreal tournament(1999) and then wolfenstein would go after. GoldenEye and DukeNukem were just next in line imo along with many others.
Others have mentioned some other great titles from that era, like serious sam, turok, heretic, hexen, blood, rise of the triad, blake stone, delta force, star wars dark forces, strife, shadow warrior, outlaws, aliens vs predator, team fortress, and a few more I can't think of, but the best I think goes to the ones above.
These kind of threads really point out how low the bar for decent, not even good games, is today. It's sad.
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Blake Stone was so difficult. And gory. And fun.
and very frustrating.
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It's sad seeing Goldeneye so low in the rankings.
But I believe this is because of a lower age average here.
The amount of gamers who were around when Half-Life was popular was much larger and it is still known and played today.
As for goldeneye, you have to been around before the "pc age" started or got introduced to the N64 later on by someone who still had the console somewhere. Or stumble on it somewhere on an emulator.
But this emulator can't emulate the fun we had on a 4-way splitscreen back in those days.
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Quake because after that no-other game looked just as interestin on PC.
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Wolfenstein by far the best, has me glued to the screen since the first game was released many many years ago
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While I wait for feedback in the discussion about polls, I'll setup a couple on the homepage as a trial to see if anyone votes or participates.
To start, the 90s were a great decade for FPS games. If you were gaming at that time, which classic FPS game/series did you enjoy the most?
Personally, I remember installing DOOM and Heretic from floppy disks. I was hooked on those two and I also spent a fair amount of time with Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold. After that I recall using HyperTerminal to connect with a friend to play Quake II co-op, although I don't think my family appreciated the phone constantly ringing late at night as our modems tried to establish a connection to game together. Do you have any memories from these early games?
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